'Mad Men' recap: Button-Down Flirt

Betty started to weep prettily in the passenger seat on the drive home. Finally, she told her husband, she had a glimmer of what it felt to be included in his life. ''We make a great team,'' she said, though it sounded more like a question. No need for her to ever know that it was Don's hand job that convinced Bobbie to goose her husband to make nice with poor Mrs. Schilling in her Stay Puft Marshmallow outfit. At the end of this depressing episode, a tearful Betty rested in the crook of Don's arm, basking dumbly in an imagined glow of partnership. While Jack Jones crooned in the background about lollipops and roses, in a love song that paints women as manic half-wits — ''one day she'll smile/the next day she'll cry/minute to minute/you'll never know why!'' — Betty hugged onto her Ken doll. (Jimmy was onto something when he asked the handsome couple if they were sold separately.)

As an antidote to all this ugliness there was Harry and his pregnant wife, Jennifer, who looks like Betty without the perfect hair, makeup, and dresses nipped just so at the waist. Harry was a boob last season, sleeping with Pete's secretary and then haunting Sterling Cooper after hours in his socks and boxers when his wife rightly threw him out on his ear. It seems that getting back into the house has made him want to be a better husband. When Harry tore into Kenneth's paycheck envelope he was stunned to see that his pal made $100 a week more than he did, and then he called home for advice. I think this may have been the first time we've ever seen a man from this world asking his wife a question other than ''What's for dinner?'' or, in a weary, resentful tone, ''What's wrong now?'' But here was Harry, spilling his anxiety and frustration to his wife, treating her like an actual partner. He later slipped into Sal's office and confessed both his crime and the counsel from Jennifer. ''You told your wife about this?'' moaned Sal, who we learned is indeed married. ''I know,'' apologized Harry, as if he was a recovering alcoholic who had snuck a drink. ''I do that. I keep doing that.'' Poor Sal, who's locked himself in the closet, looked positively disgusted. ''There's nothing you can do. That's why you don't tell your wife.'' (And that's why, when the nice chap from Belle Jolie turned his pleasant gaze at him again, Sal gave him a huffy stiff-arm on the way out the door.) Bravo, Harry, who may be the only married member of the Mad Men with a real shot at happiness. Betty might have ended the evening with stars in her eyes, but the only scene that smacked of true romance was when Harry went home to his modest bedroom and tenderly laid his head on his wife's growing belly.

A couple of big questions: Do I have to pluck the stars out of my own eyes and consider the possibility that little Hildy might have gotten an abortion last season, and that's why Harry grimaced so while watching The Defenders, later suggesting that his wife wouldn't like the show? Would the Don we know, a man who says the word ''art'' with a sneer, really spend his afternoon at a foreign film without first being told he wouldn't ''get'' it? On that note, will somebody with more highfalutin tastes enlighten me as to what the movie was? I discovered that the poem the woman was reading is by the French poet Francois Villon, a dark, self-created man born unto poverty, not unlike Don himself, but my paltry insight ends there. Finally, if these dry questions haven't run all of you off, did some of your affection for Don wither after watching that scene in the powder room?

PREVIOUS Page 1 2 3